


The Chances

by schiarire



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-23
Updated: 2008-07-23
Packaged: 2017-10-26 04:52:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schiarire/pseuds/schiarire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was in the room when the best-loved, best-looking, best-hearted D.A. Gotham City ever had opened her unbandaged eye and said, 'Bruce, I can see you pacing.'"</p><p>An alternate history of Two-Face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Chances

He was in the room when the best-loved, best-looking, best-hearted D.A. Gotham City ever had opened her unbandaged eye and said, "Bruce, I can see you pacing."

"I'm not pacing," he said. And: "Rachel -- "

"You think someone's going to hear me?" she said. "Let me put it this way. Do you think I care? Do you really think I care, at all, who you are anymore, or who knows it?"

"I don't," he said. "I don't. I'm -- "

"Save it."

"I -- "

"Shut it."

She was angry with him then because he was in range, he thought. But by the time the bandages came off, he could visit her in person, as Bruce Wayne, and tell her what he thought she wanted to hear; what he'd thought she would think was the right answer. He wondered first if she would cry; wondered next, hating himself for wondering, if she was even still physically able.

"Was it for the city?" she said, clutching Dent's blackened coin between her blackened fingers. "Was it for Gotham? So that _I_ \-- " here her voice cracked, deepening -- "could _save_ Gotham?"

He said, "Yes."

She closed her right eye; it looked like she was winking at him. "For a man with two lives," she said, "you're a damned shitty liar."

~

But he dreamed it was true: dreamed that he'd chosen Rachel, only to find Rachel's choice lying motionless on the floor except for his mouth, which like a koi's opened to and flared back from the gasoline, producing the same rubbery pops. _Why me_ , Dent would have said; might even have raged, although rage would have been unimaginable on his face merely sixty minutes earlier that day.

 _I didn't want to save your life_ , he could have answered, but would it have been the right one? Rachel, he thought, would know what the right answer was. And he felt relief; sank back into dreaming of playing hide-and-seek with her in the greenhouse. He was hiding in a clay pot just big enough for him to climb in and pull up his knees. What tree could be so big, he wondered. He traced the spiderthin white mistakes that proved the red glaze was handcrafted, and waited.

But she didn't come, and in the morning, when she said, _You didn't save my life on purpose, did you_ , he knew that the Joker had come to see her. Even if she did know the right answer once, he thought, she could not know it now.

"I'll kill him," he said.

Rachel Dawes said, "You can't."

~

After the hospital blew up, he found her safe at home, in bed. Half the bed had been unmade and so the mattress protector had bunched up around her along with the queen-sized sheets; its thin elastic ribbon showed white where the navy cotton had been fretted away.

"Sorry," he said, "I forgot to bring flowers," and tried to sit next to her.

" _Don't!_ " she shouted, her visible hand clawing into a fist, her right eye as animal-wide as the left. "Don't, Bruce, you can't -- that's _his_ side."

He nearly faltered, falling back and looking at her, but didn't. "How can you _sleep_ there?" he asked, and she relaxed, turning her head away from him, opening her hand.

"I can't," she said.

She weighed less than she had on the night when the Joker tried to kill her for the first time, even wrapped in a couple's worth of bedding, when he carried her into the living room and helped her spread all the sheets out on the floor, as if they were pretend-camping, like children. _Oh, no_ , she'd said then, gasping with him in the tent as Alfred puttered past with a breakfast tray for Mr and Mrs Wayne outside. _A bear is coming to eat us,_ and she'd grabbed the flashlight first, then his hand, _but we'll go down fighting, won't we_.

 _Go down fighting_ had been one of their favorite movie idioms, so well-known that they could have hurled it from their mouths all at once, as a single word, if they hadn't relished the idea too much to spend it so quickly. And he thought from the smiling way she bit down on Dent's dummy quarter as he wrestled her to a sitting position that she must be remembering the same thing, immersed as he was in their shared history.

But: "Turn on the TV," she said. "I don't want to talk."

 _Yet_ , he thought. Would it be worse to talk about it, he wondered, or never to talk about it? He turned on the TV. "You don't get cable?" he asked, shocked, but neither dissimulating that shock nor trying to exaggerate it.

She laughed. "You may not have noticed, Bruce, but the world isn't solely populated by billionaire playboys."

"Hey," he said. "In the billionaire playboy scheme of things, cable really isn't much, compared to –- "

"Private jets? Armored cars that can jump rivers? Time bombs? No," she said, "I imagine it isn't."

~

The Joker had lollopped out of his reach that night, wash-out green hair sculpted to his head, hands and feet stringing after his body like cans from a _JUST MARRIED_ fender. He looked like he was moving so slowly -- and he was, he did. Even gliding between your lips, his knife was slow, because around him your every cell filled with adrenaline and your life lived itself faster. The amphetamine high he produced made you think he moved slowly, but you saw no one else move at all; he was slow, but the world around him stood still.

The news flashed blue light over her as she slept, calling his name, saying: _They are dying._ Did he care, they asked? What were they, _who_ were they, to him?

He knew who they were to her; who she had been to them. To celebrate her promotion from _Assistant-_ to preface-less _District Attorney_ he'd bought her a car -- not too flashy, he thought, but still she'd refused it; liquidated the asset, and given the money into public hands.

Sensing she wasn't really asleep, he said, "You sleep with a gun now."

She turned over, tucking her tiny wrists behind her head. Her face -- her old face, the face people believed in -- stared out of the TV. Staring back, she said, "It's safer."

"For who?"

Only the Joker's scars where her skin used to be, she said "My loved ones." She said it in her old voice, her _I believe in_ voice; so he could not say, _But it's too late,_ you're _too late, they're dead._

~

Sitting cross-legged in his cave they played two-person card games. He cheated, but lost; her laughter steamed in the clear air. The white tiles were as cold as a morgue's slide-out beds and he felt, rolling the sleeves of his Princeton sweatshirt down over his wrists, that perhaps the time had come now when they could be happy.

But: " _You_ loved me the best, Bruce," she said. "You did what you thought I wanted. Isn't that right? You loved me, so you tried to save the man you thought I loved. That's sweet. It really is."

"The man I _thought_ you loved?" Asking: _But you did love him. Didn't you?_

"Harvey?" she said. "Yes -- I think so. He was good, wasn't he? He was so good. My Harvey. He believed everything I believed. He even believed in you."

But what did Dent do, he wanted to know, other than hold your hand behind your back while you saved the world? Other than sacrifice himself when it became necessary. Other than trail you to the gallows, and push his fair head through your noose.

He wanted to ask, _How long did it take, before you noticed him,_ but what he said was, "They'll pay."

She said, "They _are_ paying. Of course they are. Everybody pays."

Out came the coin again. She rubbed it on the leg of her trousers; took out another and tossed it to him.

When he caught it, she said, "Tell me, Bruce. Why did I ever fight crime the hard way, when I knew you?"

"Because it was the right thing to do," he said. "And because you're stronger than I am."

"Stronger? That's funny," she said, plucking the coin from his outstretched fingers. She disappeared it, then produced it as if by magic: from his ear. "Tada!"

He said, "A quarter?" and hit the side of his head, hard. "There's got to be more than that in there."

"No," she said. "Just twenty-five cents, same as everybody else."

~

By this count she had already spent two dollars.

He found her in a warehouse, the white gloves on her hands still unbloodied. She planted her feet further apart and spun her handguns like an extinct cowboy. "The Girl with Half a Face," she said, and spat: a tricky, demanding feat, which must have taken her some time to master. "That's what the papers call me. Isn't it, Bruce? But I don't like it. It makes me sound like I'm watching rich families eat Thanksgiving dinner by matchlight."

He tried to smile. "You _did_ watch rich families eat Thanksgiving dinner by matchlight."

"Yes, after we were expelled from the grown-up table and had to spy from the attic."

"It was your fault," he said. "You spilled cranberry sauce on my mother's best tablecloth."

"Your mother had a hundred best tablecloths." But she did smile, then, with both sides of her face. "You said it was your fault."

"Wasn't it?" He took a step closer. Uselessly, she shot him. "Rachel -- "

"Why?" She raised the gun again, clicking the safety back and forth as if she were nervous, or as if they were still playing cop-and-robber, or tag, or who can spin around longest before they fall down. "Don't think I won't aim for the gaps in your armor next time. Why did you do it? Why didn't you save _me?_ "

"I thought you wanted -- "

"What I _wanted,_ " she said, "was what was best for _Gotham_. What did I know? I should have wanted what's best for _me_."

"Rachel, what's best for you _is_ \-- "

" -- what's best for Gotham? Yes," she said, "it is, it would have been. But what's best for Gotham isn’t necessarily what's best for me. Do you really think I don't do things the hard way anymore? Because this is the hard way. Living without Harvey, being alive instead of Harvey, _this_ is hard. Prosecuting the Mafia? Easy. Shooting the sons of bitches who traded us in for their own hides, easy. Killing the cops who got in my way? Easy. Killing you -- " she tried to whistle, and failed, and started to laugh, the sound wheezing on and on out of her mouth, of her jaw, a death rattle on loop. "Well, obviously it isn't easy, physically speaking, but emotionally?"

"You don't have to do this," he said. "You didn't have to do any of it. You don't have to -- "

She asked, "What does it feel like when the one person you love most in the world dies and it's your fault?"

"Well, fuck, Rachel, I don't know," he said. "No one I love has ever died."

She shook her head. "It's been too long for you, Bruce. You got numb. It’s what happens."

"Some people would say, you get better."

"You don’t believe that."

"No," he said. "But I could kill you."

"You could. But you won't."

"I could have you arrested."

"You could," she said. "But you won't."

"I will, Rachel."

She sneered. "Nuh- _uh_. You're so fucked up, Bruce Wayne. And you're a hypocrite. You think I love Harvey too much? You think I love Harvey _wrong?_ How many people do I have to kill before you hate me more than you love me? How many lives does it take to equal Rachel Dawes?"

"Rachel, you don't have to -- "

"Guess what number I'm thinking of," she singsonged. "Here's a hint. It’s bigger than one."

"Just stop," he said, pleaded, "and -- live with me."

"Stop," she said. "Will you stop?"

He said, "Yes."

"I don't believe it," she said. Swinging a leg out the window she triggered the gas and called, "Do me a favor, Bruce. Tell your friends in the paper business the girl with half a face wants a scarier name."

Then she was gone and he wanted to hate her but could not, was not able.

 _I love her more now,_ he thought. And he thought, _Why._ And he thought, _I can’t._


End file.
